"First things first. Without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain."

In The Dilemmas of LeninTariq Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. In this exclusive extract from the Introduction he explains that without Lenin there would not have been a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917.

The Dilemmas of Lenin is 50% off until May 28th as part of our Russian Revolution reading. See all the books on the reading lists here.

It is thecontradictions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was beginning to develop in Russia, that form the object of Lenin's analysis and of his arguments. If you forget this fact, you can easily fall into dogmatism and formalism: Leninism can be represented as a finished theory, a closed system — which it has been, for too long, by Communist parties. But if on the other hand you remain content with a superficial view of these contradictions and of their historical causes, if you remain content with the simplistic and false idea according to which you have to "choose" between the standpoint of theory and that of history, real life and practice, if you interpret Lenin's arguments simply as a reflection of ever changing circumstances, less applicable the further away they are in history, then the real causes of these historical contradictions become unintelligible, and our own relation to them becomes invisible. You fall into the domain of subjective fantasy